How knowledge works

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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This is a follow up to the “Pragmatism and truth” thread. This way of seeing things is based on work as an environmental engineer and, as always, introspection. As with most engineering, the focus is on pragmatic and concrete problem solutions. I’ve stolen parts of this from posts I made on the previous forum incarnation.

In my work, I cleaned up properties contaminated with chemicals discharged to soil, water, and sediment primarily by industrial processes. Typical steps in that process, generally specified in detail by law, include preliminary evaluation, remedial investigation, problem definition, design, and construction. Here I will focus on the remedial investigation—data gathering. This is the primary stage in a remedial action when information adequate for design and construction is gathered, processed, and evaluated.

Remedial investigations generally involve installation and logging of soil borings and groundwater monitoring wells; collection of soil, groundwater, and river sediment samples; in place and laboratory testing for soil physical properties (strength, permeability, grain size distribution); topographic mapping; laboratory chemical analysis of soil, groundwater, and sediment samples; and other physical and chemical testing.

Following initial data collection, the results are processed and evaluated to prepare a site conceptual model (SCM). An SCM is just a description, image of the site which lays out all the information gathered during the investigations. To me, the most useful way of presenting a SCM is visually, using figures. Data tables are also needed. There will also be calculations e.g. groundwater flow direction and velocity, contaminant degradation rates, averages. On the figures, you can show the locations of the sources of the contamination and how it moves and is presently distributed across the site. You can also show the locations of existing and potential human and environmental receptors which may be exposed to the chemicals.

This investigation process is iterative. Once the preliminary SCM is prepared, it is used to identify data gaps where additional data is needed. Then additional investigation may be collected and used to prepare a refined SCM.

So, what’s the point of all this? As I understand, experience, and practice it, what we call knowledge is analogous to what I have described as a site conceptual model. This can manifest at different levels and scales. In a relatively simple and concrete example such as the remedial investigation I’ve described, the conceptual model is focused on a specific set of data and a particular issue. Taken more broadly, scientific theories can be seen as conceptual models that incorporate information from many different sources. Even more broadly, a whole life of experience, observation, and learning can be expressed as a world view, a personal conceptual model of how reality works. This is how I experience my own understanding of the world.

And what does this say about truth? Truth applies to propositions, but, as I’ve described it, the world does not present itself to us in that form. Problems do not come to us as individual questions. Answers are usually not expressible in simple statements. Everything we know and do manifests in networks of interactions. Conceptual models are not true, although they can be more or less accurate.

Pragmatism and truth
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Thanks for this OP. It has the unusual virtue of being based on a practice that humans actually engage in, not merely theorize and/or wring their hands about!

I’m with you in thinking that (philosophical) truth is best understood as propositional. If a conceptual model is accurate to a high degree, would that mean that it generates a high percentage of true propositions relative to the area of inquiry? Is “generates” the right word? – I’m not sure.

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Back when I was still working, I used to joke that instead of “project manager” on my business card, I would put “environmental epistemologist.”

Sure, I guess, but that sort of misses the whole point and brings us back to the substance of the “Pragmatism and truth” discussion. Truth can be a tool, but when action is required it is rarely adequate by itself.

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I like the conclusion but we can be much more precise: we are human ape, you are an ape. You have an expert aping, an expert mental simulation of the situation of a soil having to be decontaminated. This include these SCM formal models which do not really deal with the contamination but with legal issues and billing from 3 to 10 time the strict decontamination price :smiley: This is the overall Truth that unconsciously run in your mental mimicking of the situation.

The only truth of Truth as a property of some language “propositional” absurd logic is only for some institutional clerks in the “Philosophy” department to get some income and hopefully have some sex encounter in congress presentations :smiley: Oh! and also launch another infinite hamster wheel thread on TPF :smiley:

Why thinking of language dynamics is useless? Because if your clients trust you, you can get the deal with phrases that doesn’t relate at all with your SCM :smiley:

So what would be the Truth here? Not in language you emitted but in the mental simulation of the situation of your clients which includes you as a consistent decontamination provider.

The deep problem here is that English people are structurally unable to think philosophically. What they are able to do is to sell things, enslave people with legal straightjacket that exists only protect only the ultra-richs, read the Bible, and produce propositional entomological non-sensical studies that are simply a mimick of there biblical scripture studies. Go French :smiley:

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Thanks for taking the time to write this up. I think you’ve done a nice job of articulating the basic structure of inquiry. We face problems, ask questions and iteratively refine our conceptual models through validation against the world. You closed your post with the claim that conceptual models are not true, although they can be more or less accurate, and I think that this captures a valuable insight. Our conceptual models never exhaust the world, no matter how much detail we may add to them. But I wonder, doesn’t the judgement “this model is more accurate than that model” itself purport to tell us something true about the world?

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I would acknowledge my past decisions were all made within a framework established outside of simple engineering principles. Those include legal issues, my client’s ability and willingness to pay, and my company’s need to make a profit. Is that what you are saying? You seem to think there is something wrong with that. Or have I misunderstood?

What you call “mimicking,” engineers and scientists, and some philosophers, would call “modelling.”

Beyond the requirements of professional standards and ethics, I cared about my clients and their problems, personally as well as professionally.

You seem to hold the members of this forum in contempt. I don’t understand why you participate.

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I guess I would turn what you say around. What we call “truth,” although it might be useful by itself in certain situations, in most cases is an oversimplification of a more complex set of circumstances. Losing sight of that makes what we do less effective. I recognize my position is a metaphysical one—I have chosen pragmatism over some other criterion to judge the issue.

That leaves a question on the table—if you don’t accept my pragmatic understanding of truth, what standard do you apply? What is the purpose, the value, of truth?

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@T_Clark

That’s a fair question. First, I would say that truth is what obtains when the conditions of a judgment are fulfilled. To take a simplistic example, if I judge that the liquid has a pH of 7, then my judgment is true iff the liquid actually has a pH of 7. As to the value and purpose of this notion of truth, I think it underwrites all of our other epistemic notions, including accuracy. In order to judge that one model is more accurate than another I must already be employing the deeper notion of truth, because my judgment of accuracy depends on the notion that my judgment holds only if its conditions are fulfilled. Thoughts?

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Yes, but wrong only in my philosophical framework that describe regulations as 99% of predatory nature. In my social utopia there is almost zero regulation, only good practices and any professionals having the possibility to enter the state to unveil and kill some predation technique they are the only one to understand.

I do. I use mimicking to insist on the inscription of mind/thought etc. in the biological at the right level, aping behaviour, and not at the cellular, neuronal wrong level.

I lovingly do :smiley: (except Intelligent Design mollahs: my contempt is beyond hatred). I was sent here by Gemini to present my metaphysical system but as nobody is interested I started to solve some difficult questions with it. I was almost stunned by the infinite hamster wheel discussions nature on TPF, had some thought about that, and this is my conclusion: English philosophical “thinking” is just language oriented ratiocinations under Yahvic terror i.e. under the unconscious pressure of old testament. For me a philosophical problem has to be clearly prompted and then quickly and concisely answered like Descartes taught us. I’ve done that many time on TPF but people are clearly coming here for the hamster wheel :smiley:

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No, that was the very point I wanted to highlight. A true proposition is indeed a tool, in the sort of circumstances you’re describing. The question we ought to ask, I think, is why a false proposition isn’t equally useful. Or, if you prefer, why it sometimes is, but not always. What are the differences that turn something from a random piece of data into a tool? I suppose you can say, “One solves a problem, the other doesn’t,” but it’s that very effectiveness that I’m wanting to characterize in different, more illuminating terms.

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Doesn’t a site conceptual model require prior knowledge? To process and evaluate requires knowledge. So do calculations of groundwater flow direction and velocity, contaminant degradation rates, averages.

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Again, I’m looking at it from the other side. I think it’s more useful to think the accuracy of the conceptual model underwrites our understanding of the idea of truth. In a sense, I guess this is similar to a coherence theory of truth. This from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP):

A coherence theory of truth states that any proposition is true if and only if it coheres with some specified set of propositions.

A major difference is that it is a stretch to call a conceptual model a “specified set of propositions.” Dozens, hundreds, of data points go into establishing a relatively simple conceptual model. All that data then has to be processed, summarized, and interpreted. The resulting conclusions are probabilistic. And they don’t have to be true, they have to be true enough, accurate enough, to allow action to be determined.

It’s more likely to be measurements of pH from seven groundwater monitoring wells that have to be processed with statistics to establish an estimated value, taking into account the variability of the data.

I think the type of modelling process I’ve described for a site cleanup is more like the way people use ideas of truth and accuracy in their daily lives than the more formal, and I would say rigid, way described by philosophers.

I keep coming back to this—my position is epistemological, methodological. I’m not claiming it’s the only way to see this. I think it’s the most practical way, which is what I care about.

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So you want to play a different game than the one I outlined in the OP. You don’t provide an answer, you say I’ve asked the wrong question. That’s fine, but that’s not what I’m interested in discussing here.

I see the Philosophy Forum as a community of people I care about. Whatever it’s weaknesses and faults, it’s a good place. If you don’t feel that way, fine, but you should at least play nice.

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Yes. The knowledge is based on the data collected during the remedial investigation. As I noted:

I’m not sure that answers your question. Let me know if it doesn’t.

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Sure—an example. A typical soil sampling program might include 10 sample borings with two or three samples collected from different depths. Each sample might be analyzed in the laboratory for 10 to 20 chemicals depending on the contaminants released. The analytical results have to be evaluated to determine if they meet quality assurance (QA) standards. An appropriate proposition might be “The chemical constituent concentrations measured are valid.” Validity is determined by QA testing including equipment calibrating, field and laboratory QA sample analysis, and other measures.

It is. If the answer to the question is “false” the data might be rejected. If that happens, the data won’t be used for preparing the SCM.

Did I answer your question?

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I agree but don’t see how to do that. Clearly not my style but beyond that switching from the candid [nature-human] immanent to Philosophy and spontaneous human thinking to the [matter-life-thought] multi-categorical framework of the MCogito system is at least as disruptive than switching from the God’s home Cosmos to the gravitational field Newton’s Cosmos: how to be “nice” with a complete destruction of the thinking framework itself ? Doing Philosophy is thinking Reality, not having delicate English cup-of-tea infinite hamster-wheel “propositional” discussions.

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@T_Clark

You’ve made some good points and I agree that in most real-life situations we achieve neither complete certainty nor absolute precision. In engineering, we gather our data, we build our models and we state our conclusions within a margin of error. Instead of “the pH value of this water is 7” we end up with something more like “based on samples from 15 wells across a period of six months, the groundwater pH in this aquifer is estimated at 6.9 +/- 0.2 with 95% confidence”.

But my point wasn’t so much about certainty or precision, it was more about what it means to make a claim at all. When I assert a margin of error, a confidence interval or a prediction interval, I’m still purporting to say something true about the reliability of my methods or the expected value of future measurements; something I’d be willing to sign my name to, or even defend in a court of law.

So that’s all I meant by saying truth underwrites accuracy. Truth doesn’t require certainty or absolute precision. It presupposes only that there is a way that things really are, and that that’s what we’re aiming for whenever we make a claim.

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But if I was given that data I would not know what to do with it, what it means, how to evaluate it.

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Nuff said.

This text is added to make the post > 20 characters.

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In a way. Your answer illustrates what I had in mind when I said that a false proposition could sometimes, but not always, be equally useful. That does happen, in the spirit of “No experiment is truly a failure.” What isn’t useful is accepting a false proposition as true, or vice versa.

We can stay with that example. The false proposition would be, “The chemical constituent concentrations measured are valid.” When we discover that this is false, we then may reject the data, which will be useful. But suppose we continue to believe the proposition true. We’ll then go on to make mistakes and waste time until we realize what’s gone wrong.

So my question is: Are you saying that “being useful” and “not being useful” are the criteria by which we choose to accept or reject the truth of a proposition? As I sketched out the example, that seems to put the epistemological cart before the horse. Don’t we need criteria for what counts as truth-makers in order to make the judgment about usefulness? Or are we genuinely committed to agnosticism about truth until we find out how to apply (or fail to apply) a given proposition? That’s by no means incoherent, but it does have some radical consequences.